Csodálatos

When I went to Hungary in 2011, on my first trip with OM Arts, the first thing our team did there was to spend a couple of days in prayer, walking around the city, trying to sense for what God was saying to the people of Baja. After spending that time together, the sense which grew on us was the way God was bringing beauty from brokenness which we saw all around us. When we asked our Hungarian translators, they said they actually had a word for that concept: “Csodálatos”. There didn’t seem to be a good English translation of the word, but it carried the meaning of being full of wonder and beauty and awe, with the sense of birth and new life.

We needed to be able to present this art (whatever form it took) in the middle of a concert which the band was planning to perform in the middle of the main city square at the end of the week. We decided that the best way to reflect this was to create a “wall”, using a large 5′ by 12′ canvas stretched over a frame, and paint it like graffiti, or street art. We created a design for the painting based on the word, incorporating the ideas and symbols of death transformed into new life. During the actual concert, we were able to execute the painting in less than five minutes, using stencils and spray paint in alternating teams, as the band performed one of its last songs.

The people watching us from the square seemed to catch what we were trying to say through the word on the “wall” we had created. When we were done, the leader of the band came forward to talk about how this new life we were talking about, this Csodálatos, came from following Jesus. At the end, he gave a call for people to follow Jesus.

Csodálatos

What he did next is an illustration of how art speaks to people. He had arranged to have a couple of team members with extra paint spread on a couple of paper plates, standing at the edge of the stage. He then invited the audience, if they wanted to have this Csodálatos in their life, to come forward, put their hands in the paint, and then press them against the canvass wall to leave their hand print there.

I had been standing behind the stage up to this point, catching my breath. When I slipped around to the front of the stage to see what was happening, I saw more than 30 people, mostly young people who we had spent the previous two weeks working with in the art camp, coming forward to add their hand prints to the canvas. What took my breath away was the realization that each one of those hand prints there represented a changed life. Each print was a visible sign that one of them had made, stating that they were giving their life to Jesus, and that He was giving them this new birth. As they were visibly identifying themselves with this piece of art, they were making their own statement about the internal commitment they were making.